


shivering, slithering, silence fills a bell

by gogollescent



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-25
Updated: 2014-03-25
Packaged: 2018-03-13 09:20:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 680
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3376211
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gogollescent/pseuds/gogollescent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Marcoh enjoys the post-surgery life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	shivering, slithering, silence fills a bell

He is surely more aware of his face here, now, where he can’t feel most of it, than he was when just a bead of sweat could rip his concentration apart. It’s the same with vision: the permanent cap of darkness on his right eye, the tapering of scope on just that side, like a world gone literally pear-shaped—he notices more, he believes, from the closed-off corner, than he ever did looking up. Which had been quite a habit of his, before. Checking on the surveyors in the gallery: his silent keepers. Occasionally he’d seen someone of more importance—once or twice, the Fuhrer. Then it was down again, don’t tremble; look down and focus on the faces of the damned.

Mei says, I’m sorry. If I’d had time, I could have—

If any of them had time. No, he tells her, meaning it; you did very well. He massages his cheek, the hanging folds like sedimentary strata, a here-and-there of nerves and… former nerves. He misses his city; although he will admit, to himself if not his companions—more out of shame than any idea that it would matter, to them—that he feels excitement at the prospect of this journey. The task ahead, says a voice in his head, firmly mocking: always your consolation. But it’s been so long, so very long, since he was with people who knew him, and he’s never before spent _any_ time with people able to condemn—

Except for the dead. Don’t get ahead of yourself, Marcoh. Sick spurts of martyrdom aside, you’re the man you always were.

So he misses his patients. His routine, which left him no time at all, but which made him at least a benign automaton. Travel is like the scar—a long numbness, intervals of unbearable feeling, no route left out of himself. A flirtation, almost: forward and back, with his own body—his indelible past—stopping now and then to envelop him. Departing again for who knows what country. The Gate of Truth, perhaps; he can imagine his lost nerve endings there, coiled neatly like a girl’s cut hair at the foot of the door.

In Ishval, he used to lie to himself. If only they weren’t driving us at such a pace, if only they weren’t so desperate for results. Collapsing face-first into his bed every night, sleeping so suddenly, and so deeply. Waking, stumbling, thinking: if I could stay awake alone in the dark, I might think of a way to save some. Must be possible—to make the process more efficient. Circles inside circles. The brilliant lines of a pentagram, giving off flames through gloom.

Now he sleeps on a bedroll on the ground, sandwiched between Mei and Scar, because of the three of them this old man has the poorest reflexes and the least useful combat skills. Mei typically lies on his left—he thinks his bad eye makes her a bit uneasy, poor girl, and guilty too; not that she’d say so, never speaks of it after the first apology. She’s horribly precocious; has no doubt thought through the nested courtesy of silence, which at least does not imply that the hearer’s a cause for unending regret. Where Scar on Marcoh's right is, like Marcoh's younger self, a deep—swift—sleeper, although Marcoh has heard him shout in dreams. The tattooed arm sometimes unfolding upwards, palm open, as though to grip and decompose each watchful constellation.

They would no doubt be the better for it. Darkness, abject, deep and permeable; points, spearheads, of savage light. Named for Amestrian heroes, long-interred. Mei has said, there is something wrong with your alchemy. Something moving in the earth. He can make a guess. But by the same logic, he thinks, there must be something over them: some roof of walled-in souls, needing a door. He only looks to Heaven now at night. On his back, hands at his breast, thinking seriously and yet through a white star of happiness: he has his time. Who is it he still feels that he can help?


End file.
